@kiya777 wrote:
It's just weird some things are on time from further away and things closer are taking way longer....it says the buyer is based in Australia, they 99.7 positive feedback.....I have things coming from overseas and honestly I am not expecting them any time soon but I thought within Australia it would of been here by now?Thanks anyway.
Annoying, but not necessarily weird in the sense that something has gone wrong other than a transit delay. I know there are a lot of post offices around at the moment very low on stock of stamps and other supplies because it's been difficult to get that distrubuted the way it used to be, so I assume these kinds of things affect postal distribution as well.
If there's no tracking then I'm guessing it's coming as a large letter, which has three different delivery speeds "regular", "priority" and express (I put the first two in quotation marks because these terms can be pretty meaningless in certain circumstances, express is a limited service and is tracked anyway).
Regular or non-priority is technically slower than the service standards we had before priority was introduced, and priority is actually supposed to be in line with the postage timeframes we had before.
If a letter is not priority, in normal circumstances it can be held for up to two days at the initial distribution centre before being forwarded to its next destination, because parcels and priority letters will be loaded first, however if there is still room then it will go forward without being held at all; but I have also been advised that these holds can occur multiple times, even though they're not supposed to, which can blow out a normal delivery timeframe of say 4 business days to 10 business days.
With mail volume increasing due to more people shopping online, it's more likely than before that priority and non-priority transit times will have a noticeable difference, since a non-priority will only be held back if there's not enough room to send it on, so with more mail in transit, there's less room for the non-priority stuff. Sometimes the label or stamp on a priority letter will also be missed at the initial sorting stage, and if that happens, it's very unlikely to be picked up for the rest of the journey and will travel as a non-priority letter.
Generally speaking, a 2 week transit time is unusual, but not unheard of, so I advise my customers to let me know of non-arrival 2-3 weeks after posting. At the 2-week mark, I'm concerned but still have faith in arrival (genuinely lost mail is actually quite rare and most will arrive very soon after it it hits that point), but at the 3 week mark I'd definitely be inclined to think something has gone wrong, even in current circumstances. This is purely based on my personal experience, of course - I send at least 50 untracked, priority letters a week, but others will have different experiences (it often depends more on where the seller ships from and their local distribution centre than it does the postage service they use).
